They beat Intel in retail sales. That means Joe Consumer who is putting together/upgrading his box is now choosing AMD over Intel.
Joe Consumer never "puts together" his computer or upgrades his CPU. Joe Consumer buys prepackaged systems with Windows XP preinstalled.
Personally (and probably a lot of/.ers are like me) I bought my last 2 systems as case, motherboard, CPU/heatsink, hard drive, CDROM or DVDROM and assembled them. The advantages for me were (1) I could pick Linux-friendly components, (2) I avoided the Microsoft tax, (3) I could pick AMD processors, which are simply better value than Intel processors. I'd assume that almost everybody who does this chooses AMD. Intel costs more because they can charge more for being the "safe" choice for people who don't know what they're doing, a perception they have built over the years with expensive advertising. There's nothing wrong with Intel doing that, but a savvy buyer can get more for the $$.
A review is useless unless it helps someone to decide whether or not to buy a book. There are dozens of books about CSS, so for most people, the decision comes down to "which one do I pick"?
So we need comparisons. How does this book compare with, for example, Eric Meyer's books?
Lacking any comparison of the reviewed book to others, this review was a waste of time.
Politicians in China snoop on, and try to control, the citizens more than politicians in the West do.
But the difference is decreasing. Politicians everywhere want power over ordinary people. That's why they became politicians.
This story is no big deal. It's up to the Chinese to fight for their own freedom. We've proved in the last few years that we can't even preserve our own freedoms. We should fight for those before pointing the finger at China.
you could come away with enough clothes to last you all year without washing (about 5 or 6 t-shirts)
6 t-shirts last a year without washing...? I think you've just done more to turn people away from Linux than SCO, Rob Enderle and Laura DiDio combined.
We can learn from this blog
on
The War Of The Word
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Putting users of 2 products side-by-side and watching to see what they find difficult... that one idea is probably responsible for a lot of Microsoft's success.
One specific feature he mentioned as a must-have for the Japanese market, the ability to have a line of text running vertically in a table cell, is still not available in OpenOffice AFAIK.
Kicking out even FSF's documentation, on the grounds that is doesn't meet Debian's criterion of freeness, was a really stupid thing to do. Documentation is not like software. Writing software is its own reward for a lot of people. Writing docs is a vital chore which nobody likes and which gets little recognition. Keeping docs up-to-date is an even more tedious chore, which gets even less recognition, but is equally vital. The FSF docs are free enough for all practical purposes. You can copy them, you can update them and distribute the corrected copies.
Lack of good documentation is a major problem for free software. Debian just made a major problem worse.
Linux's future is one of proprietary drivers and payware wrappers around proprietary Windows drivers.
And the Debian people are rejecting this sort of thing because of their morals. That's... a wonderful way to ensure that Debian only has primitive, reverse-engineered, DMCA-illegal, flaky support for newer hardware.
I never buy hardware that isn't supported by free (as in freedom) software. As Linux use grows, there is a good chance that market forces will favor those companies which publish specs for their hardware. We have a choice. We can help to bring about the good outcome, by buying only devices that free software can support, or we can buy the stuff that makes the latest cool game look slicker (or whatever) while rewarding the bastards who want to take away our freedom. You seem to have made your choice, and I despise you for it. Neither of us knows how this will end.
Can anyone tell me if I've missed anything, though? Besides the typical lock-in reasons for using MySQL, does it actually do anything better than other databases as any sort of killer feature?
I agree with most of your post, indeed I'd go further: MySQL doesn't deserve to be called a database at all, because it does not support transactions with commit/rollback, and cannot therefore guarantee to maintain referential integrity.
But to answer your question: I think the answer is performance, compared with Postgres. Of course it's easy to have good performance when you drop vital database functionality.
And compared with Oracle, it's price. I try to use open-source stuff exclusively, but I have to admit that Oracle is one impressive product, that has no serious competitor in the open-source world. MySQL performance (or better) with complete database functionality! For once, you actually do get what you pay for.
With a free product, your own IT guys are the only resource if you encounter a bug or difficult error situation. If you're paying for a license, you have another level of support, i.e. the developer.
Why do we keep seeing drivel like this?
It has been pointed out again and again and again that Microsoft support for the end-user of Word or Excel is completely useless. If you believe otherwise, you haven't tried to use it. They'll graciously let you report a bug. That's about it.
In the open-source world, there are mailing lists you can post to, where you'll actually get useful help. And if you report a genuine bug, there's a real chance it will get fixed, based on the seriousness of the bug, not based on Microsoft's marketing-driven release schedules.
Further, third-party support companies can offer support tailored to your needs, if it's open-source software. They've got access to all details of the product - file formats, even source code. Nobody can offer support for Microsoft products except Microsoft, because the internals are not publicly documented.
Effective support is available for open-source software and not for Microsoft products. It really bugs me to see clueless moderators bump posts like the parent up to "+5 Insightful". Should be "-5 Codswallop".
And yeah, if we fought a united (!) Europe, we could probably be beaten. There are a zillion better reasons not to attack, least of all being that France is a strong ally...
No, you would not be beaten, at first. Apart from the Brits, European military forces are just a joke. And you far outnumber the Brits, and have a much bigger quantity of modern weaponry. A war between the US and Europe would last weeks, not months, and the US could then occupy any part of the continent it wanted to.
But occupying a place is not the end. A resistance movement builds up a guerilla war to kick out the invader. Why do you never see this? You lost in Vietnam, you're losing in Afghanistan and Iraq, and you'd lose in Europe. Calling the resistance movement "terrorists" is a bright new propaganda idea, but doesn't change the facts.
Re:The whole streaming audio/video field's gone cr
on
Real Problems
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Oh, MPlayer isn't illegal, you say? Who the hell are you kidding? At the first nastygram from any big patent-wielding corporation, MPlayer's going bye-bye. As far as I'm concerned, thanks to our pal the DMCA, it's just another DeCSS waiting to happen.
Just because the US legal system is owned by big corporations doesn't mean the rest of the planet is in the same mess as the US. I see no credible threat to my use of mplayer. I don't live in the US and I didn't download it from the US and for that matter, it wasn't developed in the US.
Oh, bear in mind--you'll be stuck with a US QWERTY keyboard.
Actually, although I'm a Brit living in Europe, I slightly prefer the US keyboard layout. I'm a programmer, mainly in C++ and Perl, so I use $ a lot more than the pound currency sign.
The real disaster is the Swiss keyboard. A bunch of characters you would never want to use (and I don't mean accents, I mean stuff like the paragraph sign and the degree sign) are really easy to type while essential characters like [ and { are odd contortions and ~ is a real challenge (as in, ask 10 Swiss-keyboard users how to type it and over half won't be able to answer even after 5 minutes experimentation).
But if the original poster wants a UK keyboard, you can buy keyboards separately in Europe for something in the region of $15, negligible in comparison with the saving on the rest of the system.
Many other companies (and society in general) tend to benefit from the breakthroughs in pure research from these labs, but the orginal companies usually have the biggest difficulties managing this.
That's why universities (and labs shared by universities - like CERN and FNAL) are the appropriate place to do pure research. Society benefits, society can fund it, through taxes. And the results should be free to the people who funded them (us), not encumbered by patents.
The reason most (or all) viruses are written for Windows is because that's where they'll do the most damage, since most people use Windows.
If everyone switches to Linux or Mac OS then you'll start to see viruses for those operating systems.
This is not the whole story. Microsoft's mail programs are just one big security disaster. There are clever people writing Linux attacks, but almost all Linux mail programs are inherently more secure than Outlook.
Some people in this thread have suggested that ISPs block virus-loaded mail in their servers. This is nonsense, and violates the basic concepts underlying the Internet, but it does illustrate how bad Outlook is. Essentially it's saying that Outlook is so insecure it can't even be exposed to raw email messages.
Republicans are "ultra-moralistic" in their own minds, impeaching President Bill Clinton for lying about a sexual relationship
Clinton was impeached for perjury - lying under oath while giving evidence to a court. In common-law countries, this is a serious offense because it strikes at the integrity of the legal process. In Britain, for example, Jonathan Aitken - a former Government minister - was imprisoned for 2 years for a similar crime. Lord Archer, a former Chairman of the Conservative party and a member (at the time) of the House of Lords, was also sent to jail for perjury in a civil case.
Persuading the American public that it was all about sex, not perjury, was a brilliant propaganda achievement by Clinton.
There is no way MS could re-coup anything from this other than FUD points. Where's the incentive to profit?
Are you serious? Destroy Linux, and the only current threat to the Microsoft monopoly is gone. Every time a company buys Microsoft instead of installing Linux because of fear of lawsuits, that's more profit for Microsoft. Microsoft had every incentive to fund the SCO lawsuits.
IANAL, but I'd like to see a lawyer comment on whether Microsoft could be convicted of conspiracy to violate antitrust laws.
Branding is an important function. When you run out of toothpaste, do you perform a complete, rational analysis of all competing products? Somehow, I doubt it.
Haven't you heard of a publication called Consumer Reports? You don't have to do a complete rational analysis of anything, because somebody else already has and you can get the results for pennies a month.
But most American consumers are so thoroughly brainwashed by the advertising industry that they would never consider this.
he does seem to have made more of an effort to try to find reasons to back up SCO's claims than any of their other supporters have.
He ignores the fact (admitted by SCO) that SCO distributed Linux under the GPL. That's one very good reason why his article is hogwash. Many people already have an SCO license... and that license allows them to redistribute it without fee, to anybody.
So despite the author's attempt to sound serious, balanced, objective, responsible, etc: he's just another FUD merchant.
There's no one big advantage, but a number of little ones:
The.deb package spec (arguably) is better at handling dependencies than.rpm
Upgrading (from a web server) is really trouble free, you just tell it to upgrade your files and it does it - and does it right
The "stable" version is really stable. (on the other hand it's a bit out-of-date). I haven't rebooted my firewall/webserver for more than a year.
The Debian people are fanatical about software in their distro being really free (as in freedom) - many people don't care, so this might not matter to you.
About 14 years ago I remember writing a library for outputting charts in.wpg format. It wasn't too difficult because the docs were quite good. This was for vector graphics, though, which probably isn't what you want. There are free (as in beer) Windows programs which convert other formats to wpg; a quick Google turned up Paint Shop Pro, there must be others. On Linux there is ImageMagick which is also downloadable at no charge.
Slashdot Mirror
Joe Consumer never "puts together" his computer or upgrades his CPU. Joe Consumer buys prepackaged systems with Windows XP preinstalled.
Personally (and probably a lot of
So we need comparisons. How does this book compare with, for example, Eric Meyer's books?
Lacking any comparison of the reviewed book to others, this review was a waste of time.
And I still fail to see why the user interface is perplexing.
Say you want to rotate an image.
Rightclick | image | transforms | rotate: lets you rotate by 90, 180 or 270 degrees
If you want to rotate by any other angle, it's
Rightclick | Transform tools | Transform , which also has a shortcut button.
The people who call the user interface "perplexing" are being polite. I admire their restraint. I think the user interface is a steaming pile of shit.
OK, here's some detail about the chaotic interface.
Let's suppose I want to rotate the image.
Rightclick | image | transforms | rotate: gives me the choice of rotating by 90, 180 or 270 deg.
Rightclick | tools | transform tools | transform: lets me rotate by any angle.
CHAOTIC USER INTERFACE.
I'm using version 1.2.3 which is what comes with the Testing version of Debian.
But the difference is decreasing. Politicians everywhere want power over ordinary people. That's why they became politicians.
This story is no big deal. It's up to the Chinese to fight for their own freedom. We've proved in the last few years that we can't even preserve our own freedoms. We should fight for those before pointing the finger at China.
6 t-shirts last a year without washing ...? I think you've just done more to turn people away from Linux than SCO, Rob Enderle and Laura DiDio combined.
Putting users of 2 products side-by-side and watching to see what they find difficult ... that one idea is probably responsible for a lot of Microsoft's success.
One specific feature he mentioned as a must-have for the Japanese market, the ability to have a line of text running vertically in a table cell, is still not available in OpenOffice AFAIK.
Lack of good documentation is a major problem for free software. Debian just made a major problem worse.
Linux's future is one of proprietary drivers and payware wrappers around proprietary Windows drivers.
... a wonderful way to ensure that Debian only has primitive, reverse-engineered, DMCA-illegal, flaky support for newer hardware.
And the Debian people are rejecting this sort of thing because of their morals. That's
I never buy hardware that isn't supported by free (as in freedom) software. As Linux use grows, there is a good chance that market forces will favor those companies which publish specs for their hardware. We have a choice. We can help to bring about the good outcome, by buying only devices that free software can support, or we can buy the stuff that makes the latest cool game look slicker (or whatever) while rewarding the bastards who want to take away our freedom. You seem to have made your choice, and I despise you for it. Neither of us knows how this will end.
Can anyone tell me if I've missed anything, though? Besides the typical lock-in reasons for using MySQL, does it actually do anything better than other databases as any sort of killer feature?
I agree with most of your post, indeed I'd go further: MySQL doesn't deserve to be called a database at all, because it does not support transactions with commit/rollback, and cannot therefore guarantee to maintain referential integrity.
But to answer your question: I think the answer is performance, compared with Postgres. Of course it's easy to have good performance when you drop vital database functionality.
And compared with Oracle, it's price. I try to use open-source stuff exclusively, but I have to admit that Oracle is one impressive product, that has no serious competitor in the open-source world. MySQL performance (or better) with complete database functionality! For once, you actually do get what you pay for.
Why do we keep seeing drivel like this?
It has been pointed out again and again and again that Microsoft support for the end-user of Word or Excel is completely useless. If you believe otherwise, you haven't tried to use it. They'll graciously let you report a bug. That's about it.
In the open-source world, there are mailing lists you can post to, where you'll actually get useful help. And if you report a genuine bug, there's a real chance it will get fixed, based on the seriousness of the bug, not based on Microsoft's marketing-driven release schedules.
Further, third-party support companies can offer support tailored to your needs, if it's open-source software. They've got access to all details of the product - file formats, even source code. Nobody can offer support for Microsoft products except Microsoft, because the internals are not publicly documented.
Effective support is available for open-source software and not for Microsoft products. It really bugs me to see clueless moderators bump posts like the parent up to "+5 Insightful". Should be "-5 Codswallop".
No, you would not be beaten, at first. Apart from the Brits, European military forces are just a joke. And you far outnumber the Brits, and have a much bigger quantity of modern weaponry. A war between the US and Europe would last weeks, not months, and the US could then occupy any part of the continent it wanted to.
But occupying a place is not the end. A resistance movement builds up a guerilla war to kick out the invader. Why do you never see this? You lost in Vietnam, you're losing in Afghanistan and Iraq, and you'd lose in Europe. Calling the resistance movement "terrorists" is a bright new propaganda idea, but doesn't change the facts.
Oh, MPlayer isn't illegal, you say? Who the hell are you kidding? At the first nastygram from any big patent-wielding corporation, MPlayer's going bye-bye. As far as I'm concerned, thanks to our pal the DMCA, it's just another DeCSS waiting to happen.
Just because the US legal system is owned by big corporations doesn't mean the rest of the planet is in the same mess as the US. I see no credible threat to my use of mplayer. I don't live in the US and I didn't download it from the US and for that matter, it wasn't developed in the US.
The rest of your comments seemed sensible.
Oh, bear in mind--you'll be stuck with a US QWERTY keyboard.
Actually, although I'm a Brit living in Europe, I slightly prefer the US keyboard layout. I'm a programmer, mainly in C++ and Perl, so I use $ a lot more than the pound currency sign.
The real disaster is the Swiss keyboard. A bunch of characters you would never want to use (and I don't mean accents, I mean stuff like the paragraph sign and the degree sign) are really easy to type while essential characters like [ and { are odd contortions and ~ is a real challenge (as in, ask 10 Swiss-keyboard users how to type it and over half won't be able to answer even after 5 minutes experimentation).
But if the original poster wants a UK keyboard, you can buy keyboards separately in Europe for something in the region of $15, negligible in comparison with the saving on the rest of the system.
Many other companies (and society in general) tend to benefit from the breakthroughs in pure research from these labs, but the orginal companies usually have the biggest difficulties managing this.
That's why universities (and labs shared by universities - like CERN and FNAL) are the appropriate place to do pure research. Society benefits, society can fund it, through taxes. And the results should be free to the people who funded them (us), not encumbered by patents.
If everyone switches to Linux or Mac OS then you'll start to see viruses for those operating systems.
This is not the whole story. Microsoft's mail programs are just one big security disaster. There are clever people writing Linux attacks, but almost all Linux mail programs are inherently more secure than Outlook.
Some people in this thread have suggested that ISPs block virus-loaded mail in their servers. This is nonsense, and violates the basic concepts underlying the Internet, but it does illustrate how bad Outlook is. Essentially it's saying that Outlook is so insecure it can't even be exposed to raw email messages.
Clinton was impeached for perjury - lying under oath while giving evidence to a court. In common-law countries, this is a serious offense because it strikes at the integrity of the legal process. In Britain, for example, Jonathan Aitken - a former Government minister - was imprisoned for 2 years for a similar crime. Lord Archer, a former Chairman of the Conservative party and a member (at the time) of the House of Lords, was also sent to jail for perjury in a civil case.
Persuading the American public that it was all about sex, not perjury, was a brilliant propaganda achievement by Clinton.
There is no way MS could re-coup anything from this other than FUD points. Where's the incentive to profit?
Are you serious? Destroy Linux, and the only current threat to the Microsoft monopoly is gone. Every time a company buys Microsoft instead of installing Linux because of fear of lawsuits, that's more profit for Microsoft. Microsoft had every incentive to fund the SCO lawsuits.
IANAL, but I'd like to see a lawyer comment on whether Microsoft could be convicted of conspiracy to violate antitrust laws.
Branding is an important function. When you run out of toothpaste, do you perform a complete, rational analysis of all competing products? Somehow, I doubt it.
Haven't you heard of a publication called Consumer Reports? You don't have to do a complete rational analysis of anything, because somebody else already has and you can get the results for pennies a month.
But most American consumers are so thoroughly brainwashed by the advertising industry that they would never consider this.
he does seem to have made more of an effort to try to find reasons to back up SCO's claims than any of their other supporters have.
... and that license allows them to redistribute it without fee, to anybody.
He ignores the fact (admitted by SCO) that SCO distributed Linux under the GPL. That's one very good reason why his article is hogwash. Many people already have an SCO license
So despite the author's attempt to sound serious, balanced, objective, responsible, etc: he's just another FUD merchant.
This is a case of License Holy Wars.
No, it's a friendly discussion, mainly between two groups of developers, conducted in the open. You clearly didn't read Moglen's letter.
Nor did the moderator who modded up your comment.
Why don't we blame physics instead for making it so hard to keep transistors and circuits made from them cool as speed & complexity increase.
Because the heat production of today's CPUs is many orders of magnitude greater than any limit imposed by the laws of physics.
If IEEE had made this POSIX documentation freely available 10 years ago, that would have helped the free software community a lot.
Doing it now, after volunteers have painstakingly written >95% of the man pages from scratch, is almost irrelevant.
Besides that, there were severe graphics issues, you had to have them in the arcane .wpg format.
.wpg is a well-documented format.
.wpg format. It wasn't too difficult because the docs were quite good. This was for vector graphics, though, which probably isn't what you want. There are free (as in beer) Windows programs which convert other formats to wpg; a quick Google turned up Paint Shop Pro, there must be others. On Linux there is ImageMagick which is also downloadable at no charge.
Actually
About 14 years ago I remember writing a library for outputting charts in